Patent decision

BL number

O/045/12

Concerning rights in

GB 0915496.4

Hearing Officer

Dr L Cullen

Decision date

3 February 2012

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Intuit Inc

Provisions discussed

Patents Act 1977, section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

Patent application GB0915496.4, entitled “Method and system for generating a dynamic help document”, relates to generating a dynamic help document, which document comprises questions and answers (question-answer pairs) associated with a client-server application. Such a help document provides software users with assistance to understand the features of a computer application and/or how to make optimal use of these features. The questions and answers are pre-existing ones, and relate to those features thought to be most relevant to the largest number of customers using the computer application. The invention lies in ranking each question and answer according to user feedback, so that the questions and answers receiving the most favourable feedback are ranked first. The help document can be continually updated according to the most recent user feedback (hence a “dynamic help document”).

Applying the Aerotel/Macrossan test, as modified by Symbian and the AT&T/CVON signposts,, the hearing officer found that the contribution of this invention lay in automatically generating an updated help document at a server using rankings based on user feedback about an existing help document to determine question-answer pairs for inclusion in the updated help document. The invention does not reduce the risk of a problem arising in the computer system itself; rather, it attempts to reduce the risk of an operator, when using an application on the computer, not being able to find a suitable piece of information in a help document as readily as if the dynamic help document were not there.

The invention was thus found to be a program for a computer as such, which is matter excluded under s.1(2), and it was refused under s.18(3).